While the servant Mary – whose last name we never learn – put out most of yesterday’s wet laundry to dry, Jane McHanna rose from bed to iron some of Oakes Ames’s shirts.She had spent part of yesterday placing them in a tub of starch. Evelina took to ironing as well, looking after her own collars, cuffs and handkerchiefs. Ironing, which required a small fleet of flatirons being kept warm on a hot stove, was a welcome chore on a cold day. We don’t often read of Evelina doing the ironing herself.

In Washington, D. C., President Millard Fillmore’s State of the Union address was delivered in writing to Congress. His speech was quite literal, full of specific details about foreign policy, exports, mining, gold in California, the acquisition of Texas and the surveying and improvements necessary for the territories and frontier. He lauded the importance of agriculture, noting that “four fifths of our active population are employed in the cultivation of the soil,” and argued for a Bureau of Agriculture.

Fillmore also could not help but write of the growing differences between North and South and the 1850 legislation that was designed to address various aspects of the problem of slavery. He began his address optimistically, writing “the agitation which for a time threatened to disturb the fraternal relations which make us one people is fast subsiding…” but later admitted “that it is not to be disguised that a spirit exists, and has been actively at work, to rend asunder this Union which is our cherished inheritance from our Revolutionary fathers.”

In closing, Fillmore urged patience and reconciliation. He counseled his countrymen to honor the Compromise of 1850. “Wide differences and jarring opinions can only be reconciled by yielding something on both sides,” he cautioned.

3 thoughts on “December 2, 1851”

Fillmore delivered his State of the Union message in writing to Congress where someone else read it to that august body. From Jefferson, who hated public speaking, until Woodrow Wilson, the president wrote the constitutionally required message and sent it over to be read aloud. [The constitution requires the president to do so “from time to time”.] Wilson, to some criticism at the time, returned to the way Washington & John Adams delivered the message–a personally presented speech to a joint session of Congress. Since Wilson, with a few minor exceptions, presidents have done it in person. Until FDR, the message was presented in December. Because of a number of other changes, the event moved to January. Just a word from a retired history teacher. You can get the teacher out of the classroom but . . . well, you know.